


dwelled one day among the gods and the next in hell

by YesVirginia



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Psychological Horror, Science Fiction, biotech
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-16
Updated: 2012-10-16
Packaged: 2017-11-16 11:34:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/538996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YesVirginia/pseuds/YesVirginia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To the right person, it might be like becoming a god. (Promptfic)</p>
            </blockquote>





	dwelled one day among the gods and the next in hell

It is time. It is always time because there is always that visit that looms up ahead and even if it's farther than even he can see, now, it will always come again. She will always come again, because there is nothing, nothing, nothing that would make her give up her most vital component (and at this point he would throw up, abject shame at the abject pride of being her most vital component, but his body doesn't remember how to).  
  
He is a glorified battery. He is a thing. He's a toy. And deep, deep, deep down the Empress is still the spoiled princess that she used to be, long ago, any number of his natural lifetimes ago, and all of this is one game that has gone too far.  
  
But the main reason that she will come, and come soon, is that his body is waning. The threads that stitch the skin of his back together draw out the liquid from where they are buried in his spine, distributing it along the core mainframes and feeding it back after its completed cycle through the flagship's inner sanctum, taking with it streams of information that are more vital to him now than oxygen but feel better than breathing ever did (even if he misses it, he really misses what it is like to breathe).  
  
Muscle and bone are fed on in an effort to make the feeling or knowledge - which at this point have merged into one sense that is exclusive to him - of the vastness of the galaxy rushing past never stop. More and more stars and planets always pinwheel past and with something that used to belong to him until it was stretched into this grotesque network every atom of every star is visible clearly and every death and every birth and nothing ever goes past him without exploding into its own myriad of details to be swallowed down (and that is the only food he has eaten almost since he can remember, never mind perfect memory).  
  
But his body has to suffer from his mind that wraps twice around the galaxy because his tribute is a hollow tube that sucks at his brain to make it one with the ship and the fleet and he has to sacrifice muscle and bones and skin and breath and sap away at them and make them wither into non-existence to keep his brain on growing so nothing, nothing, please, will take away eternity now that he is a part of it.  
The Ψiioniic's body is dying and somewhere a part of him is absolutely terrified, but it's kept quiet by the wires that are all through him and part of him and that conduct the vastness of this universe and every universe and that are like worms under his skin that feed him glory, the knowledge of the gods, the splendor of everything and he is a part of that which always sees and always is and which creates and which destroys and his own thoughts are the fastest connections, fast as bonds that hold the network together by searing bands of his will and fast as flashing lightning, flashing light, that wraps around the universe twice with every breath. If he still had breath.  
  
Somewhere, he can feel the Empress coming.  
And the smallest possible thing, the fraction of a fraction, the lowest common denominator of everything that he is shivers in absolute terror of death. Not the Ψiionic's death. That won't happen soon, with relief and disappointment he's sure of that.The death of that single raw pulsing near-breaking-point strip of flesh that still, somehow, at the end of its line holds together both sides of him. It won't last. Even if his body lives on as a grotesque human mainframe that piece-of-skin thought will decay into nothingness it'll snap any second now the fear of it is held only at bay by the fact that wires still feed him the whole of creation at 1 million TB per second which would be ecstasy if he had even the slightest notion of what that feels like in this state.   
  
He _hopes_ it will snap, because that means he will break and send this whole ship and every other one that follows its path careening into a star to burn to nothingness. But then, he doesn't.  
The Empress is here. Her lips are pursed and her hair is crackling like static and that is what is on the outside but on the inside her heartrate is fast and she is full of condescension and curiosity for her living battery. He can see all of this because the whole of the ship is outfitted with cameras and every camera is linked to the surveillance center that is linked to the core mainframes which means that with this method of vision which is rather mundane compared to the others, he has an overview over the whole of (his) the fleet. His eyes, meanwhile, have retreated into his skull, the liquid and salt drained out of them in an effort to use it for conduction where it counts because if he cannot conduct electricity, he will be blind to what he sees now. His eyes, meanwhile, have been blind for many sweeps.  
  
His own body is something he _wishes_ he were blind to. Everywhere the dying tissue has already been replaced is a purple-ish mass which shines with wetness and is full of salt to help the conductivity. Snares of wires connect his back to the towering processors and to the camera feeds in the ceiling and to every other part of the ship. And in the middle of what looks like an explosion of metal and flesh stopped halfway through, is his own face. Wires encroaching on the sides, preparing to take over. Eyes like cloudy slits that hold the very last vestiges of their former colours.  
  
She is, from every angle that each camera picks up, beautiful. She has to be, because she comes from a line of the purest blood and because that is the data that is stored on him, he is programmed to find her beautiful which again just proves that she still is that princess used to getting her way. But she really is beautiful, at least if he doesn't look too closely. If he does then every thought in her head unravels into a vast twitching mass where he can see that it's made up of black spots, almost, and her thoughts are as ugly as her face is pretty. He wonders if she knows that he knows, because if she does, it would be a feat of honesty from her side.  
  
But his thoughts turn to the other side at that, because everything that he knows and that is processed in his brain, the whole of everything is made up also, aside from universal splendor too take his breath away (if he still breathed oxygen, which he can likewise not remember for the past few sweeps), the whole of everything is one mess of horror and decay and corruption that fills his brain up to bursting even though his brain, again, wraps twice around the universe at this point.  
  
And that is eternal punishment, because it will not stop, it can never stop, but between screaming from the ecstasy of omniscience (something he was never meant to have) and the agony of omniscience (something that he never deserved) the Ψiioniic curses the first and praises the second because one begets the other.   
  
The Empress is looking down at him, as she always does, as is the place that is hers. She would never be worried, not about someone(some _thing_ ) like him, but in a way she still is, if only because a replacement wouldn't be easy to find.   
  
That is something like a blow against the piece of skin that still holds both sides of him together, making it shudder under the onslaught and tear even further.  
He wants to tell her this, because something like this can't be communicated in numbers, and it all rushes out – there is still so much to see, he is not finished with eternity, his body is killing itself and won't she please give him life and won't she please kill him and he calls her majesty and mistress mockingly even though it's the absolute truth, but not really the truth, because she can never understand even if she engineered all of this and won't she please do something it's ripping.  
  
At least, telling her this is the plan.  
The Ψiioniic can't speak. His body, hungry from feeding on itself, was overrun by the wires that wrap around and through it and replaced by simple tissue linking it to the mainframes, slowly extending upwards. No legs, not for some time now. But also no lungs, and while a windpipe, a tongue and teeth are technically still there, the way in which they all get together to produce sounds with meaning is completely alien to him. There are some noises, a rough string of something that doesn't even closely resemble speech, just a few meaningless syllables. No words. He gives up.  
  
„No, no, no, no, no,“ She is walking towards him shaking her head and from two dozen angles the camera feed tells him that she is extending her hand and unfolding two fingers towards his mouth and sticking them inside. That is just as well, because if she had waited any longer there might not have been much of a mouth left. As it is now, even her touch which is mockingly gentle cracks the weak skin and makes it bleed. Wires snake over to replace what melts away at the contact and coat it with a layer of basic tissue. Now he can't feel her fingers any more, and that is something to be almost regretful about.   
Then she releases the life. It is just that, and it is life as he used to know it and not as he now has fed to him from machines and it is anything but gentle in the way it rips outward and replaces the replacement tissue with his skin again and with bones and organs that he only knows from memory and there is a pulse again, there is air in his lungs again, there is everything again that he didn't know he missed and if he weren't held up so safely he would have fallen forward from the sheer overwhelmingness of it. Heaven and hell come crashing together separated only by a membrane.  
  
And then there is the data, which does not for one second stop its ascent and descent down his spine and the layer of his consciousness which is reserved for the commands that he gives and the next few seconds will feel like eternity for it and the next eternity will feel as that multiplied with itself. His body was never meant to deal with this, not with this sheer power, not with this hybrid of reward and punishment. This is why it replaces itself with artificial tissue in an effort to keep his mind from going insane, even though in her boundless cruelty disguised as mercy (and the flipside, mercy disguised as cruelty) the Empress gives him his body back before it can obliterate himself, every time, stretching onwards to the day everything will end.  
  
Now he can see her with his eyes and she is watching him shudder in his bonds, and for her, everything is as it should be and everything is in its place, the worlds running smoothly on their axes.  
As for the Ψiioniic, he is a god condemned to hell and a mortal allowed to dwell in heaven, and that thin strip of flesh holding these two sides together holds out, barely.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a reference to the Gemini mythos and the status of Castor and Pollux as half-immortal, spending their time in the land of the gods and the land of the dead alternatingly.


End file.
